On this World Digital Preservation Day, TDL is excited to share results from the Digital Preservation Services Collaborative (DPSC) Planning Project: Sustainable Community-Owned Partnerships in Digital Preservation (IMLS Planning Grant LG-252340-OLS-22). In particular, we’ll share the high level findings and how TDL plans to address the actions proposed in the final report.
The following summary is adapted from the project website:
From August 2022-August 2024, Educopia Institute partnered with six members of the DPSC (APTrust, Chronopolis, CLOCKSS, LYRASIS, MetaArchive, and the Texas Digital Library) to articulate the need for values-driven, community-supported distributed digital preservation service options and to propose a service model for collaboration that ensures the authority, sustainability, and viability of these options. This service model was to delineate where partners could combine service efforts and/or remain independent for the sake of a variety of organizational and content needs, distributed digital preservation good practice, efficiency, and sustainability at the field level.
As the project advanced the team was reminded that, as technical service providers, we too are embedded in a broader cultural context that is unconsciously biased towards technocentric solutions, or solutions that foreground technological infrastructures and background social infrastructures. Acknowledging that there are technical and non-technical requirements across the information management continuum, our shared service model vision aims to offer two additional services at discrete moments in the institutional decision-making process: “advocacy-as-a-service,” best deployed at the institutional preservation strategy-forming moment; and “readiness-as-a-service,” assisting stewardship organizations that have recently formed their preservation strategy to identify the content, preservation needs, budget realities, etc., as they begin to research the digital preservation services landscape.
Beyond individual organizations, readiness-as- a-service is also a call for collective strategy among values-driven, community-supported bit- level service providers to anticipate and be prepared to respond to change (and to shocks) in a nimble, coordinated, collaborative way.
TDL is ready to be part of this collective strategy.
Next steps for TDL resulting from the grant outcomes
We think this vision offers an exciting and viable path forward for values-driven, community- supported service providers, and we hope this vision will attract additional service providers and grow our coalition of support. We look forward to working with practitioners to support their readiness at every stage of digital preservation program planning and advocating both with them and directly to decision-making authorities.
Beginning in January 2025, TDL is launching a Digital Preservation Peer Audit and Assessment Pilot based on tools provided by the Northeast Document Conservation Center’s (NEDCC) Peer Assessment. Having participated in such an assessment last year, TWU’s Kristin Clark will lead peers from UTSA and SHSU through several months of shared assessment tasks culminating in clear objectives for their digital preservation programs. This assessment is a new step towards “readiness-as-a-service” for TDL members engaged in digital preservation.
TDL will also continue our participation in the DPSC as we expand our collective and begin to strategically address “advocacy-as-a-service” together. The final grant report recommends a series of workshops that engage key advocacy organizations, educators and trainers; middle management in stewardship organizations; senior leadership in information stewardship organizations; funders (especially those who focus on digital infrastructure, open infrastructure, expanding access to cultural materials, models of knowledge production, research reproducibility, and broadening representation in the cultural record); digital preservation practitioners; creators, donors, and researchers; and digital preservation service providers. The workshops would focus on a common agenda for collective impact, mapping the digital preservation advocacy landscape onto the information stewardship lifecycle, mapping existing community-driven, values-aligned digital preservation services, identifying gaps,and collectively developing approaches to secure long-term investment in digital preservation, and empowering community-driven, values-aligned digital preservation service providers to transform their offerings to better meet community needs (via in-depth,holistic “advocacy- and readiness-as-a-service”). The DPSC will soon reconvene to determine next steps towards activating these workshops and identifying new partnerships that could help to make progress on their objectives.
You can read more about the DPSC user survey, interviews, and findings in the final report https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11186599. Learn more about the DPSC, including its Declaration of Shared Values, in their website https://dpscollaborative.org/.